The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Parenting Brilliant, Awesome, Neurodivergent, Kids #47
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In this episode, Jon answers a parent’s question about neurodivergence and walks through how to think about kids who are more intense, more sensitive, or more easily overwhelmed. He breaks down what neurodivergence actually means, why some kids struggle more with regulation, and what parents can do to support them.
Key Topics Covered
• Why Some Kids Are More Intense
He breaks down how sensitive nervous systems work, why some kids go from calm to meltdown quickly, and why this isn’t a discipline issue.
• The Role of Executive Functioning
Jon describes how executive functioning skills (flexibility, organization, handling transitions) often lag behind in neurodivergent kids — and why inconsistency is normal.
• What Parents Can Actually Do
Practical suggestions from the episode, including:
- Lowering stimulation
- Creating predictable routines
- Giving kids more processing time
- Staying regulated yourself so you can co-regulate with them
• When to Consider an Evaluation
Jon briefly discusses how to know when an assessment might be helpful, and when it’s simply a matter of understanding your child’s wiring.
Episode Takeaway
Some kids aren’t trying to be difficult — their brain is working harder to manage everyday challenges. When parents understand this, they can respond with support instead of frustration.
Hello and welcome to an episode of the Whole Parent podcast. My name is John. I'm at whole parent on all of the social medias. And today on the podcast, we will be answering three questions that I have gotten from people who have emailed or DM'd in their questions about parenting. For those who don't know, I am on social media. That's where I get the at whole parent thing. And I get lots and lots of questions from people, from parents, I should say, probably just like you, if you're listening to this episode. And today we are kind of taking a different approach. We've been talking about parenting struggles in the last couple of weeks related to siblings. And oh man, what did we already talk about two weeks ago? You can see how the holiday season is just zapping all of my mental energy here. I don't even remember right now, off the top of my head. Should I look it up? I probably should, right? We talked two weeks ago about mornings, right? Morning routines and how chaotic they can be and how we can do things a little bit more simply. But this morning I said we're gonna do this morning, this afternoon, whenever you're listening to it, tonight, whenever you're listening, we're talking about something a little bit different. We are going into depth on kids who the either the person who is emailed in has identified, or maybe I am just calling a form of neurodivergence. And so neurodivergence, parenting neurodivergent kids is a hot topic. It's obviously something that a lot of people want to talk about because an increasing number of kids every year are diagnosed with ASD, ADHD, or some other version of neurodivergence, some other three-letter or four-letter designation. And I want to start by saying that in this episode, a little bit of a caveat. I am not a psychologist, I have no ability to diagnose any neurodivergence. But the reason why I feel compelled to talk about this is number one, most people who have a neurodivergent kid are not experts. They are not psychologists, they are not psychiatrists, they have no formal training, and yet they still have a kid who requires excellent parenting. And so the other reason I want to talk about this today is because my book, Punishment Free Parenting, which I don't plug a lot on the podcast. I should probably plug more. My publisher, I'm sure, wishes that I talked about it more. My book, kind of surprisingly, was written to neurotypical kids, or written to the parents of neurotypical kids, I should say. It had no information specifically geared towards kids with ADHD or ASD or anything else, for that matter. But in the year since it's come out, almost a year since it's come out, 10 months, what's happened is we've had more and more practitioners and clinicians telling me that they are using my book specifically with kids who have sensitive nervous systems, whether that's ASD or ADHD, or who have had a traumatic experience, PTSD or CPTSD. And as a result, now increasingly punishment for reparenting is a book that is used by people in that community. And so I feel like a lot of my parenting advice is specifically geared in ways that wasn't intentionally going to help those members of that community. I am myself ADHD, and perhaps that's part of it, is that I'm parenting in line with my own perspective. I don't know if my kids have neurodivergence. Some of them act like it. Some of them have certain things that indicate to me that they may be, but none of them have been diagnosed. But I do come in contact with many, many parents of neurodivergent kids. They're in my membership, and again, they read my book, and they found a lot of the helpful and a lot of the information in that, in those different places to be helpful. I also did a previous podcast episode in the old format of the podcast where I did deep dives with different experts. On ADHD, I brought in my friend Dr. Josh, who is a psychologist, to talk about parenting strategies for kids with ADHD and what it's like to parent a kid with ADHD. And that is one of my most downloaded episodes ever. In fact, it may be my most downloaded episode ever. And I've had a lot of positive feedback. So this is kind of a 2.0 on that. We're not only talking about ADHD today, we're talking about neurodivergence of all kinds. For those who are not watching this in a video form, yes, I am back out on the porch. Yes, it is still 40 degrees out here. It has not warmed up at all since the last time I recorded a podcast. But I got a little heating pad for my feet. I got a what I call a pizza warmer above my head, one of these infrared silent warmers that gets you skin deep warm. I got a little like light sweatshirt on, and I feel pretty good. Mostly just excited and pumped to be talking about parenting today, as I always am. It warms me right up. So without further ado, I want to jump into our first question messaged in. And this one comes from Rachel. Rachel says, Hey John, my I think my five-year-old is neurodivergent. Mornings feel like a sensory avalanche for him. The lights, the clothes, the noise, all of it. By 7:30 a.m., he's already overwhelmed. By 8 a.m., he's melting down while I'm trying to get everyone out the door. I don't want to treat him like he's a quote, problem to be solved. Wow, Rachel, I love that. But I also don't know how to support him when his environment seems to attack him the second that he wakes up. How do I make my mornings less of a battlefield for his nervous system and mine? I'm glad that you ended it with and mine there, because one of the first things that I want to tell parents of neurodivergent kids, whether your child is potentially autistic, as you said, or you just said neurodivergent. I'm kind of inferring autism here, or ADHD. No, you know what? I shouldn't even say that. Could be ASD, could be ADHD, could be none of the above, could just be a highly sensitive kid, could be a kid with sensory processing issues, could be a lot of different things, right? The first thing that I love that you said is that you need to regulate your own nervous system. And that's basically where I would want to begin any conversation. And that's by just starting by saying, yeah, this is overwhelming to parent kids like this. When I did a workshop on uh ADHD, parenting ADHD and ASD kids, that just called them strong-willed kids, but it was in the context of a group that meets of very neurodivergent kids. Uh, when I talked to that parent population live, it was probably six or eight months ago, I had this really amazing experience of being able to see in real time as I was kind of offering them the principles that were that are in punishment free parenting, how they were kind of embattled by their experience of raising kids that are just a lot. They are challenging to parent, they require excellent parenting. And that experience really shaped me more than one-on-one relationships with parents, more than uh group coaching environments and things like that, where I have a group of people. When the group of people was specifically all parents of kids who really, really struggled because they had opted to come to an event like this, it was very clear to me how much taking care of the parents was as much as as important in the process as taking care of the kids. And so I want just to identify here first and foremost that I think that you're probably doing a great job already. Even the idea that your kid is not a problem to solve gives me the evidence to support the conclusion that you're probably doing a pretty great job already, and that we do need to come up with some tools and tactics and tricks, but that I want to start with that. The second piece here is understanding that this is not a problem with your kid. And I want to say that over and over because as we increasingly see discussions of neurodivergence, especially autism, in the public square, let's say, when we have different governmental leaders getting up and speaking, some more informed or less informed than others, we often cast these neurodivergences, these ways in which their neurology, their brain, diverts from what is considered the typical or the norm. We view that as some sort of problem to be fixed or solved, or some sort of, you know, disease that we need to cure or prevent. Instead of saying that probably most of these kids have brains that would do just fine if the world was set up for those types of brains. And so the reason why I still do use the term neurotypical, even though a lot of people have moved away and said, well, nobody's really neurotypical, the reason why I still will use the term neurotypical is because I think it identifies a very key sociological and cultural construct that we uh have here, whether no matter where you are, but especially where I am in the United States. And that key construct is that the world is set up for neurotypical people. So wherever you fall within the neurotypical spectrum, that's uh maybe a term that you haven't heard in the past, um, but wherever you fall within that neurotypical spectrum, if you identify or if you believe or if you exhibit traits associated with neurotypicalness, what really you're saying is that the world is built for the type of brain that you have. Now, obviously, that means that the world is not built for the type of brains that kids who are neurodivergent have. And I'll add adults, because one of the important things to recognize is that as much as we don't know all of the causes of neurodivergence, we know that the largest cause or the most significant factor in neurodivergence is not an environmental factor, it's genetics. And so, as again, as people who may or may not be evidence-driven continue to forward this theory that there's something in the water or there's something in the medication that we give pregnant women that is causing some kids or an increased population of kids to be neurodivergent, what we know, the researchers who actually study this stuff, is that at least a significant factor is that neurodivergent people are getting married and having babies and neurodivergence, especially ADHD, is in some form or fashion genetic. And so understanding that for this, everything I'm seeing in this episode, many of the parents who are listening, maybe were diagnosed, maybe were not. It kind of depends on how old you are, where you lived in the country, uh, whether you're a man or a woman. Women tend to be far less diagnosed, uh, especially historically, but even today, than men, if with either of these things, you, or with any form of neurodivergence, what you're probably experiencing with your kid often feels to many parents very familiar because they may have a less severe or a way of coping with the experience of having kids. And I think this is kind of a blessing, nature's blessing here, or if you believe in God or the universe or whatever you believe in, there's kind of a blessing here in that, you know, I think one of the most compelling things that we can do for our kids is to learn to empathize and perspective take. I very famously, Fred Rogers, who I quote probably more than anyone else, and I quote this quote more than any other quote, he said, when asked, What is the number one things parents can do to become better parents? He said, to remember what it was like to be a child. And so, in many ways, neurodivergent parents are the perfect people, more important than being a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a parenting author or anything. Um, the best person to parent a neurodivergent child is a neurodivergent parent because they know what it is to experience the world in that way. And sometimes that can come off in maladaptive ways, where the child, the parent says to the child, you know, just suck it up, deal with it. I had to deal with it. But it can also be a very adaptive experience of being able to deeply empathize with the experience that your child is having. And so, all this to say to Rachel, it may be that your nervous system is overwhelmed because anyone's nervous system would be overwhelmed if you had a kid who was melting down and overwhelmed by 8 a.m. every single morning. It may also be for you that it's extra over stimulating because neurodivergence is in some way part of your story as well. Now, it's funny that I began the episode by saying that I didn't remember what our episode two weeks ago was about, or two episodes ago it was about, I should say. I don't always know when these are going to exactly come out. But the thing that I should begin with is that if the problem is with mornings, one of the key things that we can do with neurodivergent kids who struggle with executive functioning and task management often, and all will get stuck on things or get hyperfixated or not be able to do items in a series and things like that, is to create a very brutally predictable morning routine. So you can go back and listen to that episode. I'm not going to rehash everything I said there. But it is important to remember that the reason why kids need routines, why they thrive within routines so to such a better extent than even adults do is because they struggle to predict the future. Well, this is more true with kids who struggle with executive functioning, and even more true of kids with ASD, ADHD, et cetera, when the plans then subsequently change. And so if you're having a problem every morning, then I would say you probably need a better morning routine. And I by better, I don't mean like you have to be some sort of wizard and you have to like have everything ready all the time, but rather that it's very, very brutally predictable to kids. Kids who are neurodivergent tend to thrive in environments that are structured with routines. And you might be saying to yourself, but John, all kids thrive in those environments. That's right. In many ways, everything I'm going to say in this episode is also true of neurotypical kids. In many ways, everything I'm saying in this episode can be applied to neurotypical kids. And if we raise them in the same way that we raise ADHD kids, they are AD ASD kids, they'd probably do better than if we just raise them with a less caring way. This is why I say kids who are neurodivergent just require excellent parenting, right? I'm gonna say that again. Kids who are neurodivergent just require excellent parenting. It is not that kids who are not neurodivergent would totally fail or would totally fail if we gave them this type of parenting. In fact, they would probably do better too. It's just that they can usually tolerate worse parenting. And so what's great parenting about the morning? Well, as I talk about in my book, it's making sure that your kids are fed when they're actually hungry. A lot of us don't feed our kids enough in the morning, and I'm not saying breakfast is the most important meal of the day or some other, you know, kind of placation here, but or you know, uh, I don't want to say placation, that's probably the wrong word. Some other sort of, you know, just turn a phrase or cliche. It's that kids who are hungry are harder to parent. It may be that bedtime needs to be earlier the night before. Why? Because if a kid is not well rested and we know that kids who are neurodivergent need just as much or more sleep than their neurotypical counterparts, then they're going to be more dysregulated in the morning as well. It may be that your neurodivergent kid right now is using a bunch of screens as soon as they wake up because maybe they're an early riser, and that's causing them to have this huge dopamine letdown before the day even starts. And so now the lights, the clothes, the noise show up and they're hungry or they're tired or they've, you know, had all these high dopamine activities, or maybe they're just eating sugar every morning and that's all they're eating. And I'm not trying to demonize breakfast cereal or anything like that, but just understanding that as all of these things compound in a neurodivergent child, then it becomes intolerable to have the itchy clothes, the noise, and all of it. So, what does this look like? Number one, I would say it might look like turning down the lights. It might look like having less scratchy clothes, it might look like having a quieter morning routine to try and play whack-a-mole with those individual triggers for your child. But it might also be that their resilience tank is already so depleted by the fact that they don't know what's coming next. The morning routine's not consistent, they don't know how to navigate all of these different things, being hungry, being tired, being overwhelmed or overstimulated, that when all of those things come all together, then mornings feel super chaotic. And it may be that if you took some time to reset and actually set down a morning routine, it might be a lot easier for them to manage the lights and the clothes and the noise, even, you know, and so we can attack this two prongs from both sides. We can start to remove some of the triggers while also removing some of those things that make our kids inherently less resilient. And again, this goes for not neuro, only neurotypical kids. You said, hey, look, I think my five-year-old is neurodivergent. I would say, whether your child is neurodivergent or not, this is all good advice. At least in this case, uh, this is good advice because this is what how kids tend to thrive. So that's what I would do first and foremost. The next thing that I would do is I would work on a couple emotional regulation games. And this is probably a good time to plug the emotional regulation game guide that I have. Emotional regulation games for neurodivergent kids can be really, really regulating forces. I think that these work especially well with ADHD kids, at least in my experience, parents of ADHD kids get a ton out of the emotional regulation game guide. I have a full emotional regulation game guide that is like 25 games. It's actually been recently updated. I don't even know if by the time this episode airs, the new one will be up. The old one's great too. That's about 19 bucks. I also have a free one with five games. And I'm excited to also announce that I have a children's book coming out, my wife illustrated in April, at the end of April, that is just emotional regulation games as well in the format of a picture book. And so you can play these with your kids. But having those emotional regulation games, whether you get them from me or whether you make them up on your own, those can be helpful tools because eventually something is going to go off the rails, right? Eventually something is not going to go well, and you are going to have to help your kid to co-regulate. And the way to do that with a neurodivergent kid is often to play an emotional regulation game, where with a neurotypical kid, you might be able to regulate them by just saying, okay, slow down, take some breaths. Probably not going to work with a kid who's already kind of at a 10 over the over stimulation of the environment. And so that's kind of my three-pronged approach to this one, Rachel. It'd be number one, take care of yourself. Oh, I didn't even say that one. Let me let me let me pause for a moment to say that one. What I was saying at the beginning when I all got started, part of the reason the joy of this being unscripted and not written out is that sometimes I'm going to, it's going to feel very natural. And sometimes feeling natural is going to be that I get distracted and I forget my first point. My first point was supposed to be that you need to take impeccable care of yourself, Rachel. It means that you need to be regulated yourself. You need to make sure that you've eaten and been properly caffeinated or uncaffeinated, if that works for you. You need to make sure that you and your nervous system are getting the help that you need and getting the sleep that you need. Because if you're trying to parent a neurodivergent kid from a depleted state, I promise you, it's it's going to be so much harder. And those kids can really pick up when we're not in a good place and they're gonna mirror the heck out of that. And so step one is always to take impeccable care of yourself. And anytime that you're doing something that's self-care related, as the parent of a neurodivergent kid, I want you to think of it as doing it at least in part for them. You are taking care of yourself for them. It makes it a lot easier to prioritize that extra exercise or prioritize that extra sleep in the beginning of the night or going to bed earlier or prioritize, you know, doing whatever you need to do, journaling, whatever, to make you feel good. Prioritizing, taking time away from your kids, to have relationships outside of your kids, uh, being with your partner, being intimate with your partner, whatever that looks like for you, all of those self-care needs, those should not be things that you are selfishly doing in spite of your kids and what they need from you. When you have a neurodivergent kid, especially, I mean, this is true for all parents, but especially parents of neurodivergent kids who require so much more often. Taking impeccable care of yourself is one of the most giving and loving things that you can do for that child. So that's step one, take impeccable care of yourself. Step two is to make a predictable morning routine that that is working with those things, not only the seen triggers, the lights, the clothes, the noise, but also the unseen triggers, the hunger, the exhaustion, the dopamine letdown, whatever that looks like. And then last but not least, it's I don't even remember where I was going with this. Oh, yeah. It's understanding that for them you need to work within the nervous system response and create these predictable routines that are gonna work with them. I I feel like I just said three things, but then I was waiting for a third thing. Oh man. As you can tell, I'm it's late in the day for me now. I'm already starting to lose my grip. It's okay. I'm gonna take a quick real break here, and then we're gonna get back to caller number two or question number two. My life my wife always lists these as caller questions. And I'm like, why are we saying they're callers? They're always emails. Nobody's leaving a message with these things. Although, if they did, man, I could just play their message. That would be fun. Okay, take a quick break. We'll get to number two with Carlton. All right. Carlton says, Hey John, my seven-year-old is ADHD. I'm gonna assume, Carlton, that you have a diagnosis, but even if you don't, that's okay. The school has become a daily spiral for him. Uh, okay, we're talking about school. Okay. His teacher says that he's bright and curious, not surprised. And but I'm getting calls home almost every day. He's getting in trouble, missing instruction, or just generally melting down. By the time he gets home, he's so spent that every little tiny thing sets him off. The whole evening becomes recovery mode. How do I support him in school so it doesn't drain every bit of his resilience by 3 p.m.? Carlton, man, this is a really hard question to answer. Maybe I should have filtered this one and not put it up on the podcast or thought about it for longer before I did this. I'm probably going to give an answer that most people are not going to like. But I hope, Carlton, that you at least can accept it for what it is. When I finished writing Punishment Free Parenting, I started to think after the process of like, you know, doing all of the marketing for it and promotions for it, which I'm kind of actually bummed that I didn't get to do more promotion for it. I felt like my publisher dropped the ball on that a little bit. But when I finished it, I started thinking about like did was this an enjoyable experience for me? And immediately I concluded, yeah, I love writing books. It's like one of my favorite things to do. It was a very easy yes of do I want to write another book? The challenge became do I want to write another book with this publisher? And do I want another write another book? What do I want my next book to be about? I mean, obviously I wrote this punishment free parenting. That's about general parenting wisdom. It was a great first book based on the platform, based on the podcast, based on all that. But the question was, what am I going to write about next? And a couple things popped up for me. Could talk about neurodivergence, could talk about siblings, could talk about education. And initially, I landed on writing a book about education. And the reason why I wanted to write a book about education is in many ways, everything that I had talked about in punishment free parenting, this idea that we actually know a better way to parent, and that most people who are experts in parenting know this better way to parent, but it's not wild, widely available to the average person who has a kid. A lot of the same themes are true within education. Most of the people who are leading educational reform efforts, who are experts in education, they know what some of the problems are that we have, and yet they those problems are not being addressed by the average teacher or by the average principal or school district. And so I spent a long time researching the history of education, probably a hundred hours or more, definitely more than a hundred hours, actually, now that I think about it, prepping and writing the proposal for this education book. And before I even sent the proposal in, in the process of editing that proposal, after I'd written a chapter of the book and written the outline of the book and all this other stuff, I was asked a question by my agent. And she basically was like, okay, so what do you want people to actually do? What's the good news here? And I started to think, you know, that is a good question. I don't want to just, you know, issue a bunch of problems and maybe even solutions to those problems that parents can't actually, or or school administrators can't actually impl put into practice. And so I started to look at how these reform efforts, the ones that were widely accepted, things like the the how homework before the age of you know 12 is basically pointless and is more destructive to kids than letting them just play freely outside. Things about grade segregation, right? Both, and I mean that in a variety of ways, grade segregation and the idea that we segregate kids by age, the way that we segregate kids, and also the way that we segregate kids by what types of grades they get. The process that we often call tracking or detracking, where a kid who's performing at a high level gets pushed forward while a kid who's not gets kind of held back. Even if they are progressing through the grade levels, they might be not progressing as quickly through, let's say, trigonometry or English. They're not on the honors track or the AP track, they're on the regular track or the remedial track. And so a lot of these things were, you know, the necessity of creativity, the failure of the grading system in general, the assessment system, standardized testing being a problem, like all of these things that were widely accepted. And one of the things that was widely accepted was how poor schools are at handling and dealing with kids who are neurodivergent. And as we see more and more kids being diagnosed, again, that may not be entirely because of the increase in actual people who have these conditions, but also might just be the understanding gap of how we're coding things. And kids who would never have been coded as ASD in the past, who might have received an Asperger's diagnosis or no diagnosis at all, are now being coded as ASD. Um, that in the process of that, as we're seeing that, we need to adjust schools accordingly. And as I've tried to push forward into this, what became very clear was that none of these systems, there was any hope in my mind of change. And that was a really hard thing for me because I am a deeply hopeful person. And I wound up scrapping the book. And I tell this long story on the podcast to say I wound up scrapping the book because I have no faith whatsoever. Not in teachers. I have so much faith in teachers. They're doing an amazing job. Many of them are implementing these reforms in their own classes to the extent to which it's appropriate. Not even in administrators, who, by and large, many of them were trying to make these reforms, not in school boards, but in the system as a whole. What I started to receive was not back in the form of modern education research, was not that anything I was saying was wrong, but rather that what I was saying was impractical with the system that we have set up. The system that we have set up now is designed to filter kids, to, you know, push certain kids forward, to hold certain kids back, to basically just be childcare at an early age while also simultaneously pushing them through these different ranks. And that to change that system would be fundamentally upset the Apple cart for a population of people who doesn't vote and is generally not considered in the public sphere, and that's children. And I was deeply kind of hurt by that. And the result, and why I sell this question this answer in the midst of this commentary to Carlton here, is because the sh unshakable reality is that a kid with ADHD is going to struggle in these environments. And there's not a whole lot we can do about it. There's not a whole lot we can do when the system is set up for a person whose brain does not function like your seven-year-old ADHD child, which is why we tend to medicate. For some people it works well, for others, it doesn't seem to work as well. If you're working with a practitioner, a healthcare provider, a psychiatrist who is working with you on that, I I trust them to make the best decision for your tr you and your child, especially if you're cogn conscious and aware and working with them. But basically, all of our interventions are around the fact that kids need to be changed to fit within the system rather than the system be changed to fit the children that are in it. And a kid like your son, Carlton, is going to struggle because the way in which the instruction is done, again, to no fault of the teachers, but the way in which the instruction is done, the way in which all of these different facets interplay with one another, it's not set up for him. It's designed to filter him out in many ways. And if he's able to overcome that in the long term by coping strategies, working with you. Again, medication, if that is what works in his case. But but really, societal factors beyond medication is it's it's medication plus, right? It's never just medication in isolation. Um if he's able to overcome, the outlook for him is extremely good. You know, 40% or some crazy number of all CEOs are ADHD. So I I'm not worried about his long-term future, but getting to that long-term future feels like a daily spiral, which is what you called it. I'm not surprised that you get calls home. I'm not surprised that they say he's bright and curious. The calls home probably come from some form or fashion of not needing more physical movement within class, being bored by things that he feels that he's already understood, causing mischief and trouble because he's curious and or not wanting to move on. Maybe he wants to continue to stay on a given topic. And just generally melting down when all of those things kind of coalesce and he's told, no, just like suck it up, you know, deal with your emotions and and cope. And so I'm not surprised that he comes home and he's exhausted and the entire evening is recovery mode. The truth is, again, I don't know if he's on medication or not, but this is what parents of kids who are on medication often report because the medication wears off by three, four o'clock in the afternoon. And now the kid is just like kind of bouncing off the walls. They're they're going nuts at home. So the school may receive the benefits of that, or the child may receive the benefits of that in the school environment, but often not at home. And so I'm not surprised that it's recovery mode. I think that the key with supporting him is number one, to set expectations around school and say, hey, look, I am not going to be the person who is going to place all of my stock in whether you're a good or a bad kid, based on what teachers or uh the school environment says. You know, I know that you're bright and curious. I know that you are thoughtful and empathetic. I know who you are, and I'm not going to allow that perception to be shaped by your inability to fit into a system that was not designed for you. I think that a lot of positive comes from that. I think one of the things that you can do as recovery mode is to allow for that, you know, I call the three things that every kid needs when they get home. It's especially true, probably, for your son. Number one, some food. They're probably desperately hungry. Number two, they need to move. And number three, they need to just not be bossed around. They need some autonomy. And so you have the restraint collapse that comes when we don't, when they don't have those things. But if we can give them those things immediately, I think that that would be better. Another thing that I would say is that when we have a kid who needs that freedom and that autonomy, which lots of ADHD kids do, they need it to a greater extent even than their neurotypical counterparts. Those kids probably not gonna be a great fit for a bunch of organized sports immediately when school ends, right? Because they've already had to struggle through the concept of being bossed around all day and now they get you know dumped into a soccer team where they're just gonna be bossed around some more. They need free, kind of unstructured play, a lot of it. And I think that that could, in some ways, uh curtail some of that recovery mode necessity. But I think the truth is in some ways, the way that you're supporting him in supporting him, no matter how you support him, his resilience is to some extent going to be drained by 3 p.m. Because imagine you were in an environment that was just a job that was absolutely life-sucking to you, you would be drained by 3 p.m. And I don't know the solution here. Again, I I scrapped the book because I didn't have a real solution that was practical. But what I know is that as parents of ADHD kids, we have to think seriously about what our expectations are about that and to think long term, right? I like to imagine that my job is to help my kid to be healthy and happy and relationally strong and mentally strong for their whole life, not just for their schooling years. A lot of parents are hyper-fixated on getting their kid to 18 with straight A's and a lot of extracurriculars, or getting their kid graduated from college with all of these accolades and exciting things happening for them and getting them into their first job. I don't really care about that stuff nearly as much as I care about the emotional resilience, the mental health, the relational resilience, and all of those things that that by and large, we don't that's not the stuff that made the the the the how good your job is and how much money you make and and all that and the opportunities that are afforded to you. Not a lot of that has to do with your life after about 35 years old. Just because you started at a lower position, or just because you didn't go to that premier college and you went to the state school or even the community college or whatever, a lot of that stuff comes out in the wash when you've been in two or three jobs. Nobody is asking anymore what what school you went to when you're 35 years old. Nobody's asking anymore what your grade was in biology freshman year, even when you're 25 years old. And so I think much of looking forward as a seven-year-old for the next, let's say, 70 years of his life or 80 years of his life, 10 times his life, right? So if he's only 10% of the way through his life or less than 10% of the way through his life, how many of those years is going to be spent in an environment like this? I mean, another 10, 15 years max? And then what do you have? You can either have a kid who's been beat down by the system that was not designed for him, and he feels like there's something wrong with him and he feels like a failure, and the parents just, you know, kind of lockstep with the educational institution that said, you will comply and you will do all this stuff. Or, or you can say, you know what, my kid is curious and he's bright, and I'm gonna focus on that, and I'm gonna focus on leading into that, rather than my kid gets in trouble every day or misses instruction or is mentally melting down. I don't even care about the missed instruction at seven, right? They can catch up. I care about the melting down because it tells me that there's some there's some fundamental need not being met. There's not a lot you can do with the school system. You can get an IEP or or different uh educational plans to try and give him the the stuff that he needs. Some of that's gonna work, some of it's not. I think really the main thing is the mindset shift away from this is the most important thing ever, to maybe it's not. Maybe there are other things that we can do in life that are more designed for him, artistic endeavors, athletic endeavors that are just more suited to his desires and thoughts and hopes and dreams. You can't really make an ADHD person do something. I was actually talking to a very, very famous parenting creator, probably the biggest parenting creator on the internet, at least on Instagram. I was talking to her and she's ADHD, and I was kind of explaining this to her, and she was like, Oh my gosh, nobody's ever said this to me in this way, and it's so helpful. I said, You can't really make an ADHD person do something. You can the only way is to inspire them that they want to do it. And once you inspire an ADHD person to want to do something, there's nothing that they cannot do. But doing something that you hate and doing something you don't want to do, it's about the worst thing that you can force on a person. It just will never work. And so now I'm gonna take a little break, take a drink, and then come back with another answer. I hope that that was not the worst answer ever, Carlton. Question number three comes from Tanya. She says, Hi John, my nine-year-old is incredibly bright. Another bright kid, not surprising, but struggles with emotional regulation in ways that parents don't seem to understand. I'm sorry, in ways that other parents don't seem to understand. People keep telling me that she's being dramatic or manipulative and I should stop giving in. I want to help her, but I don't know where to start. I know you're the no punishment guy, but punishment seems like the only option sometimes. Tanya, thank you for this question. Thank you for the honesty of saying, hey, you're the no punishment guy, but I don't know if that's gonna work for me. Um let me begin by saying that the way that first thing that I want to say is that your instincts that your child is not emotionally manipulating you with their lack of emotional regulation are correct. Kids do not manipulate parents with by melting down. I'm not saying that kids have no capacity, especially a nine, to manipulate their parents. I'm saying that the way in which a child melting down is is cast often as manipulation is nonsense. It is not manipulation. She is having a hard time, she is not giving you a hard time. And that is likely because emotional regulation for her is what we call a lagging skill. I've spent the last, I don't know, how long of this episode's even been, 40 minutes or something, um, talking about neurodivergence, and I cannot believe it hasn't come up yet, come up yet, but I'm gonna say it right now. The best book on neurodivergence is actually not billed as a book on neurodivergence. It's called The Explosive Child, other than my book, of course. Mine is the best, but no, just kidding. Ross Green. Dr. Ross Green wrote The Explosive Child, I don't know how many years ago, but it is changed my life. It is the second, my second favorite parenting book after The Whole Brain Child. And honestly, it might be my first favorite parenting book. I gotta get him on the podcast, even if it's in the older format, because he is brilliant. And one of the things that he talks about is that all of these different diagnoses, and again, he is a doctor, so he can do all of the diagnosing, unlike me, right? But he said, you know, whether it's ASD, ADHD, ODD, PDA, even Tourette's in certain cases, no matter how what diagnosis is leveraged on these kids, really what it comes down to is that they have a lacking skill or a lagging skill. I think I said lacking, right? Lacking or a lagging skill in emotional regulation. In the same way that a child learns how to walk at 12 months, roughly. Although, you know, I thought my daughter was gonna be able to walk. It's she's now 13 months old, she can't. She's not lagging yet. But you know, kids can have a lagging skill. I had a one of my kids who was lagging skill of talking. He needed speech therapy. Um, some kids have a lagging skill related to emotional regulation. They emotionally regulate like they're many years younger than they are. And really, what happens is we just need to spend more time continuing to co-regulate with those kids because it's a lagging skill. It's a skill that just takes them longer to develop. What happens is parents who don't see that on a day-to-day basis, who cannot identify that this kid is having a hard time and they think, oh, they must just be manipulating their mom or their dad, they come in and say, oh, well, they're just manipulative because they're nine. They have to be able to do this. No, that is not true. There are kids who have different lagging emo d developmental skills at different times. There are kids who can be night trained from their diapers at two years old. There are other kids who cannot be because they don't have antidiuretic hormone that that is produced in their body naturally. And so they can't be night trained until they begin to produce that hormone. Again, this is a very, nobody would be going after a kid who couldn't walk at 14 months and saying, oh, they're just manipulating you. They can totally walk, they're just manipulating you. No, it's obviously a lagging skill. A person who can't hit a baseball has a lagging skill, right? Some of us never develop that skill very well. But person, you know, all of these things are skills to be developed. And emotional regulation is in the same way a skill. It is a it is neural pathways in the brain that have to be uh built. Some people build those neural pathways more easily than others. Some people require additional repetitions before they really understand it. Your daughter is a person who has a lagging emotional regulation skills. You have identified it that way. Don't believe the hype that somehow this is her manipulating you. And when you understand that what she's doing is not misbehavior, it's trying to get her needs met, and she has no ability to do so because she can't emotionally regulate on her own, you realize that you're not giving in. I'm not saying that you don't have to have boundaries, you do. And that's going to help her. Boundaries help kids who struggle with emotional regulation, no doubt. But really, the the key here is what I said all the way back in the first one, which is doing those emotional regulation exercises and games, even with a nine-year-old, because it's through the repetition of going through the stress cycle, I get escalated and then I come out of it, I get escalated, and then my mom brings me out of it, I get escalated, and then I learn how to get out of it, that they develop those neural pathways so that they can do it on their own. So, why do I think punishment is not going to be effective? Because if it was truly manipulation, punishment might disincentivize the manipulative behavior because the child fears for either their safety or in some way that they're going to receive harm, social harm, being separated, relational harm, being isolated from their parent, emotional harm, being screamed at, physical harm, being spanked, right? Like all of these are different ways. Punishment is just different ways of harming a child to make them not want to do a thing that you don't want them to do. It may stop the manipulation in the short term, at least with you, may probably not with other people, but I don't think it's manipulation. And so now you're punishing a child because they can't regulate their emotions. And punishment, we know, just causes children to become more dysregulated. Because while it may, they may go internal with a behavior and they may freeze because they're afraid of what's going to happen next, that is not actually regulating their emotions. Right? If you could scan their brain, they would be no less afraid. They would be more afraid. Just the outward manifestation of that fear might not be in tantruming. It might be in lock jaw terror. And so punishment seems like the only option if what she was doing was intentionally manipulative. And even if she was, it wouldn't be the only option. There are so many better options, including the deployment of effective consequences and good strategies of working with. And I haven't even talked, oh man, I man, I'm out of time in this episode, but I haven't even begun to talk about all of the collaborative problem solving stuff, right? The stuff from the end of my book, that's the stuff that's the best with ADHD kids. Go back and watch the original episode on ADHD. Do you talk about collaborative problem solving as like the fundamental strategy to use? Way better than punishment. But I can promise you the reason that punishment in this case is especially harmful and unhelpful is because what's occurring is not a manipulation. And the last thing that I'll say here from Dr. Ross Green's book is that this is going to look like choosing your battles. That there is going to be times when a kid, a kid is melting down over everything. You can't try and fix everything at once. You have to settle in on one or two things, remove the triggers around those things, and then focus on the emotional regulation games and skills around those things, and then use the successes of those things to build on future things. You cannot, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, and the neural pathways that are formed over literal years that it requires to learn how to effectively regulate your emotions are not built in a day either. And any of the stuff that you're going to get advice from other traditionally minded parents about punishing and isolating, none of these things is actually helping your child regulate. They may be helping your child suppress and repress, but certainly not in a way that's going to effectively work with your kid. And so I'm out of time. I will have to do another episode on neurodivergence. But I hope that Tanya and Carlton and Rachel, you guys have learned something. And if you are listening to this and you have a neurodivergent kid, I would love to hear more about if this episode is helpful to you. But just take all of that and understand that the world was not set up for kids like yours. Uh, it's extra overwhelming for them. And I bet you they're doing the best that they can with what they have. And I bet you that you're doing a really great job too. All that it takes is that consistency to keep going and that compassion and empathy to remember what it is to be a child. Imagine that you were them. I bet that you wouldn't be doing anything to manipulate the people who you love the most in the world. All right. I'll catch you on the next one. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast. Thank you again for listening to this episode of The Whole Parent Podcast. If you are listening to this right now, yes, you in your car driving somewhere on a walk with your kids, perhaps your kids are melting down and you're listening to this on your headphones with the noise cancellation turned on. Whatever you're doing while you're listening, doing the dishes at night after your kids go to bed, I don't know. That would just be me if I was listening. Stop right now. I have three quick favors to ask you. I promise they're not going to take you very long. The first one, very, very easy. Go in to wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate it five stars. That's one, two, three, four, five stars. The more five star reviews that our podcast gets as we accumulate episodes, the more likely it is to be pushed out to more parents who are searching for parenting podcasts to solve their problems. Whatever you got out of this episode, whether it was something that to try with your kids, whether it was a new way to think about parenting, maybe this episode was not specifically about a problem that you're having, but you're somebody in your life who's having this problem. Go in and rate it five stars. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, that first one only takes you 10 seconds. If you have an additional 30 seconds, just type a few words for me to read. I'd love to read, I'd love to read the reviews. If there's something specific that's helped you, write it out. It helps me to know what we should keep doing here on the podcast, week in and week out. 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You don't know if they listen to it or not, they might never reply, but maybe, just maybe, they'll love the episode so much that they become your new parenting partner out there in the world, doing things the same way that you are, and you might have just made your new parenting bestie. The last thing that you can do is definitely the biggest ask for me, but it is to go over to Substack. That link is down below in the bio, and to subscribe so that these episodes can keep coming to you. Paid subscriptions on Substack is the only way currently that I am being funded here on the Whole Parent Podcast. That is the only money that I receive. It is$5 a month. I think that this podcast is worth the price of a coffee for you. If it's not worth the price of a coffee for you, obviously don't do it. But if you're extra cheap like me, you can just subscribe annually. I know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year. 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